Delightful Scars

Exhibition Dates: March 23-26, 2021

Think about the ambiguity of life and the relationships in it; how a single soul exists in a maelstrom of chaos and confusion juxtaposed with stability and stagnation, surrounded by different borders and boundaries. This leads to the nearly certain result of uncertainty and disillusionment as one strives for permanency and security. They consider the surfaces as definitions for outside versus inside, intimate versus public, us versus others, permanency versus entropy, femininity versus masculinity, and shown versus hidden. They explore the possible gaps and approaches that can be used in navigating the relationships between these pairings.The artists attempt to capture a sense of things in transition and/or metamorphosis, when things are out of control, and the displacement and discomfort of the situation through usage of ambiguous organic bodily forms, texture, and color relations.

Shahrbanoo Hamzeh’s art pieces are a departure from the imagery of a type of large metal doors, which were common in her country, Iran, when she was a child. She depicts the poetic duality that exists in different boundaries found within the painful touch of life. How these boundaries create a paradox in which they provide safety while creating a barrier to aid if one is in need. This duality is expressed through vulnerability, flesh, fluids, and open lacerations contrast with durability of the cold, rusty, and earthy nature of the metal doors, but neither of these are directly referenced in the painting. The references are ambiguous and subjective to the viewer. She is inviting the audience to think and imagine the family relationships behind the doors; the possible trauma and suffering that family members can cause each other. The artist is talking about femininity and power relationships inside of the families and how entropy affects these families as well as the doors that “protect” them.

Alanna Veitch’s work is a combination of bodies, biomorphic forms and things from the natural world. The emotional content projected into them acts as a metaphor for the psyche. They represent these disembodied feelings the artist has that manifest as an object. These sculptures are viewed as living things on a cycle, on their own journey. They are transitioning from one part of their life into something else. The artist used a combination of carving, abstracted images, and blasting holes into the forms. The abstracted sgraffito image tells a story which the form reacts to. These marks made are combinations of swift, slow, and methodical that represent anxiety vs. normalcy. In contrast, holes are blasted into the form obscuring the imagery. The objects that are perforated represent feelings that there is always something cannot be fixed or controlled. This process enables the artist to embody emotion in the object itself in addition to the surface created on them. At the same time, these holes let light in presenting a beauty or new hope.

Driven by an obsession with everything anatomical, Amy Yeager’s work explores context removal and manipulations of scale and truth in the creation of speculative biological formations. The combination of emotionally charged images of wounds and excised tumors with benign organic growths like lichens and slime molds results in imagined forms and spaces separated from the idea of body, though undoubtedly organic in nature. Their inexplicit origins and meticulous rendering means the drawings present as believable, though this deception is without malicious intent. Rather, the artist intends to welcome a deeper look into the pieces and the actual worlds from which they came. With an emphasis on surface texture and contrasting depth, the drawn forms and spaces suggest the hidden and unacknowledged. By departing from drawing what is to drawing what is not in terms of what and how things exist in shared space, she attempts to find comfort in uncomfortable subjects; to reveal beauty where many choose not to look.